Surveillance & Technology

Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act has passed the Senate as part of the FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report. The bill will establish “an interagency center housed at the State Department to coordinate and synchronize counter-propaganda efforts throughout the U.S. government.”

The US sent a “planeload of FBI agents” to Iceland in 2011 to frame WikiLeaks and its co-founder Julian Assange, according to a former Icelandic minister of interior, who refused them any cooperation and asked them to cease their activities…

A bill meant to help those with developmental disabilities would allow government agencies to locate people with tracking devices, which has some concerned the measure gives the federal government too much authority and power…

Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg are among the small group of top tech leaders who will attend a summit with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday at Trump Tower in Manhattan, according to numerous sources with knowledge of the situation…

With approval ratings as low as 15% , few in the U.S. would ever take the rascals in the U.S. Congress serious about an investigation into a bunch of citizen journalists who work for pennies on the dollar to bring the facts, facts, facts to the awake public or former investigative journalists who were given […]

For the third time since September, Facebook is disclosing new measurement errors. The two new errors affected the reaction counts Facebook reports on Pages’ Live videos, as well as the engagement figures Facebook reports for off-Facebook links; the latter link engagement metrics were recently used in investigations by BuzzFeed and The New York Times into […]

In the trove of documents provided by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is a treasure. It begins with a riddle: “What do the President of Pakistan, a cigar smuggler, an arms dealer, a counterterrorism target, and a combatting proliferation target have in common?…

Yahoo has patched a critical security vulnerability in its Mail service that could have allowed an attacker to spy on any Yahoo user’s inbox. Jouko Pynnönen…reported a DOM based persistent XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) in Yahoo mail, which if exploited, allows an attacker to send emails embedded with malicious code…

One of most pernicious means underway to crush independent news sites is the release of software tools that brand them as unreliable. This means that hidden developers and the parties that fed them information are beyond any accountability, yet would serve as censors…

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Google has responded to claims of anti-Semitism in its search engines by altering autocomplete suggestions. Suggestions for the phrase “are Jews…” by a Google search engine are usually followed by “evil”. People searching “are women…” had autocomplete suggest “evil” and for “are Muslims…”, “bad” was the suggestion…

In 2014, the financial services site Motley Fool estimated the mineral wealth of the moon to be between $150 quadrillion and $500 quadrillion…The moon, for example, is abundant in Helium-3, an extremely rare element on Earth that could theoretically be used as fuel in future nuclear fusion plants…But the real gold, at least initially, is […]

Law enforcement officials can redact investigative information from dash-cam videos but must release the remainder of recordings to the public, a unified Ohio Supreme Court ruled Tuesday. A case-by-case review will be used in the future to determine which portions of the videos are subject to withholding…

Politicians have exempted themselves from Britain’s new wide-ranging spying laws. The Investigatory Powers Act, which has just passed into law, brings some of the most extreme and invasive surveillance powers ever given to spies in a democratic state. But protections against those spying powers have been given to MPs…

The unelected executive arm of the European Union (EU) is threatening to escalate from “non-legislative” action if Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube do not censor what it considers “illegal” online speech within 24 hours…

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The critical Firefox vulnerability being actively exploited in the wild to unmask Tor users has been patched with the release of new browser updates. Both Mozilla and Tor Project has patched the vulnerability that allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code on Windows operating system via memory corruption vulnerability in Firefox web browser…

The FBI and others will be able to take advantage of the removal of jurisdictional limits to search computers anywhere in the world using a single warrant issued by a magistrate judge. It will also be granted the same power for use in the disruption of botnets — in essence, searches/seizures of devices owned by […]

Researchers say they’ve uncovered a family of Android-based malware that has compromised more than 1 million Google accounts, hundreds of them associated with enterprise users – 86 apps available in third-party marketplaces can root 74 percent of Android phones…

To keep yourself safe, you are advised not to open any unsolicited file that has automatically downloaded onto your computer, especially image files with unusual extensions like SVG, JS, or HTA. The bottom line: Don’t be curious to look at image sent by someone, at least for the time being…

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